Have you ever wanted to know when the next paradigm shift will occur in computing?  Will it be mobile computing or large servers?   I think it has started happening.  As I write this, the newest iteration of the Apple iPhone (3G S) hits the street.  Think about the metrics here.  We have reached a mass of users that can listen to music, get directions, play games, manage their servers and VNC into their desktop and home.  We have embarked upon a mobile device that is nearly all things to most people, of course, within the AT&T coverage. Today, this mobile device is about twice as fast and will be reveling in the new 3.0 apps. We shall see more and more industries embrace this technology as the days of multiple devices will get smaller. With the U.S. Senate now getting involve...

"Protect accidental or intential release of backup/recovery tape data with data encryption used in IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager." ...The newspaper headline read, “U.S. National Corporation Freely Releases Customer Information on the Internet.”  The article begins, “U.S. National Corporation earlier today provided public access to confidential customer information including names, addresses, social security numbers, and credit card numbers.  The customer information was apparently routed internally to personnel not authorized for viewing.  In accordance with ‘full disclosure reporting,’ USNC has posted the information in a file on their website and made it available for download and viewing.” Further down in article, the CEO is quoted as saying, “…when we discov...

What is it?  You probably have heard all the advertising and banting around of the term, but what value is it to you?  Why should you care?  Well, for one, cloud computing is not an "epiphany".  It is something the industry has been trying to deliver in a cost effective way for years. It is this - delivering everything you need as an end user (infrastructure, platform and software) as a web service.  That is  it in a nutshell. But here's the tricky part - how to know what you need when you need it?  There is  the wide open field that companies are racing to fill. The "cloud" in this case, is the Internet as we know it.  The users are you and me, and we are delivered the services we need over the "cloud" on a per use fee basis, or a subscription.  We aren't required to inv...

It has been a common practice for a lot of systems administrators to take systems in the Data Center for a spin; some are inspired by their buddy Chuck… you know Chuck, he is the outgoing guy from the local users’ group… and others by their own thirst for knowledge. They click around in the GUIs, look to see first hand what the command they heard about actually does, bang at the keyboard while exploring the CLI, and mull over what features they think they need to implement in their environment. I see the hunger to expand their understanding of the systems as a very valuable trait – a trait I personally wish was more dominant in our world. I praise administrators who actually take the time to read the CLI guide, discover that they can create server farms full of 4-way SMP VMs in ...